Squires-Cannon v. White

Appeal
from the United States District Court for the Northern
District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 15 CV 6876 -
Virginia M. Kendall, Judge.

Before
Posner, Easterbrook, and Hamilton, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

The
plaintiff and her husband used to own and live on a 400-acre
estate and horse farm in Barrington Hills, Illinois (a
wealthy suburb of Chicago in Cook County, Illinois). They
leased the horse farm, which they called "Horizon Farms,
" to a company they owned called Royalty Farms, LLC,
which managed the farm's operations, including the care
of the horses, which at one point reached 50 in number. But
there was a mortgage on the couple's property, and it was
foreclosed in 2013. The Forest Preserve District of Cook
County-a county commission that owns more than 69, 000
forested acres in the county-bought the property at the
foreclosure sale. Royalty Farms, LLC, was not a party to the
foreclosure proceeding, but nevertheless the Circuit Court of
Cook County issued an order (called a Dispossession Order),
the validity of which has not been challenged, directing the
plaintiff and her husband to vacate the property.

The
Forest Preserve District is not interested in feeding or
breeding or otherwise operating a horse farm on the property
that it obtained in the foreclosure; and, unsurprisingly
therefore, it requested that the plaintiff and her husband
move the horses off the property. But taking the allegations
in the plaintiff's complaint to be true, for a time the
Forest Preserve District tolerated the continued presence of
several horses (after the foreclosure sale, the number of
horses on the property dropped from 50 to 7). The plaintiff
continued visiting the property daily to feed or otherwise
tend to the remaining horses, although the Dispossession
Order had set a deadline of November 18, 2013, for the couple
to vacate the property; nine months later the plaintiff was
continuing her daily visits.

She
entered the property once again on the morning of August 13,
2014. This time, however, she was arrested and prosecuted in
state court by the Cook County sheriff for criminal
trespass-but she was acquitted in a bench trial because the
judge could not conclusively determine that she'd ever
been told not to enter the property. In fact she had
been told, in an email by the Forest Preserve District's
lawyer that she had received and read the night before her
arrest, that any entry by her into the property would be a
trespass and that "continued trespassing [would] be
addressed by the police."

A year
later she brought this federal suit, naming as defendants the
Forest Preserve District, its general counsel, its outside
lawyer and his law firm (he was not an employee of the
District but rather a member of a law firm-Holland &
Knight), fifteen unnamed members of either the staff or board
of the Forest Preserve District, and the three Forest
Preserve District police officers who had arrested her. The
suit accused the defendants of false arrest and malicious
prosecution. The accusation had and has no merit, and the
district court was therefore right to dismiss the suit. And
though she'd been acquitted in the state prosecution,
there was probable cause to arrest her for criminal trespass,
which under Illinois law is trespass plus knowledge that the
owner of the property trespassed upon has not authorized the
trespass, 720 ILCS 5/21-3(a)(1)-(3)-conditions clearly
fulfilled in this case. As a criminal trespasser she was of
course liable to be arrested, and couldn't plead
ignorance of the trespass since, as noted, she had received a
warning-and defied it.

The
plaintiff argues that we know that the Forest Preserve
District notified her that she was not permitted to enter the
property only because of documents attached to the
defendants' motion to dismiss her complaint: those
documents were a copy of the email warning sent the day
before the arrest and a copy of the plaintiff's
affidavit, submitted in state court, acknowledging that she
was aware of that email. It's true that, if matters
outside the pleadings are presented to a court on a Rule
12(b)(6) motion, the court normally must treat the motion as
one for summary judgment and give all parties a reasonable
opportunity for discovery. Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(d). But the
plaintiff does not dispute the veracity of these documents;
indeed, in the district court she withdrew a contention, made
in one of her briefs, that she had not received notice that
she was prohibited from entering the property. So she was not
deprived of "the opportunity to conduct discovery and to
present contrary evidence on a point of genuinely disputed
fact." Williamson v. Curran,714 F.3d 432, 442
(7th Cir. 2013).

She
claims to have been arrested without probable cause because
she entered the Forest Preserve land as an employee of
Royalty Farms, LLC, rather than in propria persona.
But neither her status as an employee of Royalty Farms, nor
Royalty Farms' rights if any (probably none) in what was
now Forest Preserve land, is relevant to whether there was
probable cause for her arrest, since the order approving the
foreclosure sale stated that the Forest Preserve District
"is entitled to and shall have possession of the
mortgaged real estate ... no sooner than 30 days from the
entry of this Order [entered May 5, 2014], without further
Order of Court"-and the Forest Preserve District, in
notifying her that she was unwelcome on its property, clearly
forbade her to return for any reason, in any capacity:
"The Cannons cannot enter the property any more, and
have no reason to do so." The Forest Preserve and its
police did not have to rule out the remote possibility that
Royalty Farms had a property right, unmentioned in the order
approving the foreclosure sale, that would entitle its agents
to enter the property over the Forest Preserve's
objection. Cf. Hurem v. Tavares,793 F.3d 742,
745-46 (7th Cir. 2015).

What is
true is that an alternative to the arrest would have been for
the police, upon accosting her on what was now Forest
Preserve land, to have told her she was trespassing and that
they would escort her from the property and that if she
refused they would arrest her. She might have refused and
therefore have been arrested, for remember that she'd
defied the arrest warning that she had received the night
before, but her complaint suggests that she might have been
willing to leave the property. In any event the fact that the
police had an alternative did not make the arrest unlawful,
for they had an unquestionable right to arrest her because
they had probable cause to believe her a criminal trespasser.
...

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